Field of the Invention
Embodiments of the present invention generally relate to a system and method for managing contact center data and particularly to a system and method for managing contact center reporting information and data.
Description of Related Art
Contact centers are employed by many enterprises to service inbound and outbound contacts from customers. A typical contact center includes a switch and/or server to receive and route incoming packet-switched and/or circuit-switched contacts and one or more resources, such as human agents and automated resources (e.g., Interactive Voice Response (IVR) units), to service the incoming contacts. The contact center includes a database for storing information of the contact center. Contact centers distribute contacts, whether inbound or outbound, for servicing to any suitable resource according to predefined criteria. In many existing systems, the criteria for servicing the contact from the moment the contact center becomes aware of the contact until the contact is connected to an agent are client or operator-specifiable (i.e., programmable by the operator of the contact center), via a capability called vectoring.
The primary object of the contact center is to store all the customer related information as data that can be used to serve the customers in a better way or for speech analytics. Traditionally, in contact center deployments, vendors such as Avaya, Cisco, Genesis, and so forth, install on-premises equipment or hardware such as, gateways, servers and software that run in the contact center. Software that runs in the contact center usually includes a reporting system that allows a customer to run contact center services on a private Local Area Network (LAN). Contact center information is then stored on the reporting system that was installed by contact center vendors. However, this approach purely exists on the on-premises equipment that runs on the customer LAN.
An ongoing challenge in the standard on-premises contact center environment is the scaling capability, where the customer runs a contact center reporting solution and a significant amount of data is generated. Even with a medium sized customer, for example, terabytes of data is generated. In a traditional approach, the data is usually stored in a set of databases or in the on-premises equipment of the contact center. The customer has two different options to handle the generated data.
First, the customer configures the on-premises equipment with a first in first out (FIFO) configuration, meaning all the data can be deleted automatically by the reporting system based on customer configuration. The customer configuration includes FIFO or number of days the data is stored in the set of on-premises databases. For example, if the customer configures the on-premises equipment to store data for 60 days, any data older than the 60 days is automatically deleted from the set of databases in order to store new data that arrived after 60 days in the contact center.
A second option for the customer is to create a data warehouse solution. Data warehousing allows the customer to install a separate server with separate software coming from vendors such as, Oracle or IBM other than the contact center vendors. The customer copies the data from the contact center reporting system databases into the data warehouse solution that is stored inside its own private LAN. Then, the contact center develops the report for the contact center from scratch on top of the data warehouse solution. This can be an expensive and time consuming option for the customer, as the customer has to invest a significant amount of time and money in buying additional software, servers, or storage. Also, the customer has to invest a lot of money in processing power to be able to copy the data from the standard contact center on-premises equipment to the data warehouse system. Typically, this approach is achieved through a process of borrowing a significant amount of processing power, requiring quite a big investment. These are the challenges for the on-premises software in the contact center environment.
In another, pure cloud-based, approach, vendors detail the customers for whom they do not need to install any on-premises equipment or hardware. A general definition for “the cloud” or “cloud-computing,” for purposes of this disclosure, is the utilization of virtual servers available over the Internet and not in situ or at the premises, e.g., at the contact center. In this approach, the vendors provide a reporting system stored in the cloud (at the remote servers), where the customer is connected to a cloud-based server through a communication network (e.g., the Internet), in order to view and run the stored reports. However, for the cloud-based solutions, the challenges are different. A lot of customers do not want a purely cloud-based contact center environment. This means they are willing to install on-premises equipment but do not want to run a truly cloud-based contact center environment. Also, in the pure cloud-based solution, the customer's voice and data is arriving from the cloud and they do not have anything stored in the on-premises equipment. If there is no Internet connection, agents of the contact center may not be able to provide customer services to the incoming contacts. This is one of the major limitations of the “cloud-based only” approaches in the contact center environment.
There is thus a need for a system and method for handling relatively large contact center information and data in the contact center reporting environment, without investing relatively large amounts of time and money in processing power, storage, servers, manpower and so forth.